by Alex Marwood
The girl’s face flashes through her mind again, pop-eyed and black-tongued, cobweb veins on livid cheeks. Death, so abnormal yet so familiar: the shock, the cavernous emptiness behind those reddened eyes; it’s what it always looks like. Nobody dies and looks like they’d been expecting it.
‘It was …’ She has to think about her words. Strives to recall her emotions, to separate her response to the scene in front of her from her panic on her own behalf. ‘I don’t know. It’s weird. It was like I was in a bubble. Watching myself. In a weird way, I felt like I wasn’t really there.’
Vic leans back and opens the drawer in his bedside table. He fishes out his Ventolin inhaler. Takes a puff. ‘Bet you were scared, though,’ he says, his voice small from holding his breath. ‘Was there a moment when you thought they’d think you’d done it?’
‘Vic!’ She’s scandalised. ‘My God!’
‘Sorry,’ he says. Breathes out.
7 p.m.
‘We can’t go home like this.’
They face each other in the field, waist-deep in cow parsley. The sun is low, but still bright, and they cut smeared and dingy figures now they’re out in the open. Bel looks down at her hands, and sees that her nails are cracked and black from digging. Looks back up at Jade. She’s filthy. Earth and lichen, scraps of leaf and twig, scratches from thorns and bark on her arms and shins.
‘My mum’ll kill me,’ says Jade.
‘It’s OK,’ says Bel. ‘Just put it all straight in the washing machine. She’ll just put stuff on top. She won’t even notice.’
Jade is appalled. There is no washing machine in the Walker household. She’s always thought of them as things you found in launderettes. That Bel would assume they had one underlines the gaping chasm of difference between them. Jade’s mother does the family wash by hand, soaking everything in a heap in the bath on Monday night, then squeezing and scrubbing it wheezily through before pegging it all out on the network of lines she’s rigged up across the yard on Tuesday. It’s just another thing that makes Jade stand out at school: that all her clothes, hand-me-downs from older siblings, are grey and threadbare compared with her peers’. Everyone knows that the Walkers are dirty and have no self-respect; someone makes sure to tell her so every day.
‘I can’t, she …’ Even now she is unwilling, in front of this girl with her cut-glass accent and her Levi’s jeans, to admit the whole truth. She doesn’t have friends, but she knows instinctively that this new, shining person would vanish from her life in an instant if she discovered the full extent of where she comes from. She still hasn’t realised that their brief friendship is already over. ‘She’ll kill me,’ she finishes lamely. ‘Look at me.’
‘Come on,’ says Bel. ‘We’ve got to get clean.’
They pick their way back along the sheep path to the stream. The meadow is splashed bright yellow with islands of dandelion and ragwort. They are silent, now, and don’t dare look at each other. Their hateful task has robbed them of the chatter of the early hours. The only words they can find are practical, brief. They scramble along the bank to the pool. It seemed deeper when they were floundering about, fighting for footholds, but the water is deep enough to reach their thighs, and runs clear, the mud they kicked up all settled. Neither mentions what they’re doing, but each girl looks about her surreptitiously for Chloe’s blood, for any signs of what has happened here.
‘Come on,’ says Bel again. She strips off her top, her jeans, and dumps them into the water. Jade hangs back. ‘Come on, Jade,’ she urges.
‘Then they’ll be wet,’ says Jade doubtfully.
‘We’ll squeeze them out. And it’s still hot. They’ll be dry in no time. And anyway, we can say we fell into the river. No one knows where we’ve been all day. Come on!’
Jade strips off her top and skirt. Her knees are green from kneeling in the woods. She wades reluctantly down into the water and stands there, shivering despite the heat, hugging the clothes to her chest. Bel snatches them away, throws them into the water. ‘Scrub,’ she orders. ‘Come on. Just get on with it.’
Bel drops to her knees, water up to her chest, and rubs vigorously at the dirt on her arms and shoulders, the sweat in her armpits. Dips her head beneath the surface and re-emerges, dripping and swiping the grime from her face. Gestures to Jade to follow suit.
I can’t, thinks Jade. That’s where she … Where her face …
‘I can’t swim,’ she says.
‘Don’t need to. Come on.’
Bel lunges suddenly forward and grabs her by the arm. Stares hard into her eyes. ‘Jade. Don’t go soft on me now. If you don’t do this, if you go home looking like that …’
She avoids completing the sentence. Doesn’t need to. Knows that Jade is filling the words in for her. They’ll know. They’ll realise. Already they’re distancing themselves from what they’ve done. Trying to separate the actions they’re taking now from the reason why they need to take them.
Jade kneels and plunges beneath the water, like a Baptist.
She opens her eyes below the surface, sees that the water is once again thick with kicked-up mud. It’s dark down here. Quiet. This is what she saw, she thinks. This is how it was, her last moments.
Chloe’s face looms at her through the gloom. She kicks back in panic, struggles upward, bursts out into air. She flounders through the water to the bank. Half crawls, half runs to the top. Stands there shuddering in her underpants.
They reach the gate. Each girl is dripping, clammy in her damp clothes.
‘We’ll split up,’ says Bel.
She’s much calmer than me, thinks Jade. She seems to know what to do. If it was just me, I’d have made so many mistakes by now. They’d all know already. That it was me.
‘I’ll go back through the village,’ says Bel. ‘To mine. They can’t know we were together. Do you understand?’
Jade gulps, and nods. ‘Yes.’
‘They can’t know we were together, ever,’ says Bel. ‘You know that, don’t you? We can’t see each other again. If we see each other, we just pretend we don’t know each other. OK?’
‘Yes,’ says Jade.
‘Do you understand?’ asks Bel again. ‘Not ever. Do you understand?’
Jade nods again. ‘Yes. I understand.’
‘Good,’ says Bel.
She turns away and starts across the meadow, towards the west end of the village. The sun is beginning to set, and she casts a long shadow.
Chapter Six
Stan’s already rolled a cigarette while the press conference was wrapping up, and lights it as they step into the car park. ‘Good God,’ he says. ‘What sort of morons put on a lunchtime bloody press conference and don’t even lay on any bloody sandwiches? You’ve got to do sandwiches if you want a good write-up. Everybody knows journalists need sandwiches. I could have been in the pub.’
Stan is old-school. Very old-school. He comes from the days when journalism was largely conducted in bars, and somehow he continues to live his life as though those days still existed. By modern Fleet Street standards he is a dinosaur, still doing his research by telephone and attendance rather than news feeds and a couple of hits on Google. But he sucks you in when you see him and reminds you what attracted you to the job in the first place.
He plonks himself on a wall that holds in a bunch of evergreens and a collection of discarded fag butts and soft-drinks cans. Kirsty grins and settles down next to him.
‘Yeah. That was pretty much a waste of time, wasn’t it?’
A rich Guinness growl emerges from his throat. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘at least it got me away from Sleaford.’
‘You’ve been up in Sleaford?’
‘Yes. Even the name sounds like something you find on your shoe, doesn’t it? I had to volunteer to cover this just to get out of there. What I want to know is why they can’t start murdering people in places you’d actually want to go to. Seriously. How about the seaside, for a change? Just bloody selfish, I call it.’
‘Child F and Child M?’
Stan nods. Another week, another outbreak of schoolchild violence: two twelve-year-olds bullying another till he jumped off a railway platform into the path of an oncoming train. The whole thing recorded on CCTV, so there was no doubt as to the identity of the guilty parties.
‘Of course,’ says Stan, ‘if they hadn’t got rid of the staff on that station, they wouldn’t have needed the CCTV and someone might’ve stopped it. Shit. What a world we live in. Price of everything, value of nothing. There seem to be bottomless funds for wheelie-bin Nazis, but God forbid you’d want to protect someone’s kids from a pair of bullying scumbags.’
Her heart jolts. She’s always thought of Stan as relatively liberal. For a crime reporter.
‘Seriously?’ She says. ‘Bullying scumbags?’
Stan sighs. ‘Yeah, I know. But that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Poor little shits didn’t stand much chance of being anything else. The usual shower of useless parents, absent dads, third-generation doleys. I went and doorstepped Child F’s mum. Exactly what you’d expect. Still in bed at one o’clock and a bunch of kids doing wheelies on the pavement outside among the dumped fridges. And do you know what she said?’
Kirsty shakes her head.
Stan adopts a Universal Northern Accent. ‘“Nowt to do wi’ me,”’ he says. ‘“He’s out o’control, that one.”’
‘Yes, but …’ she begins timidly. She never knows how to argue this subject.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Stan sighs again. But it would be so nice if just occasionally people would try not acting up to their stereotypes, wouldn’t it? And at least F’s mum was honest. Know what the other one said?’
His voice goes high and sappy as he imitates Child M’s mother. ‘“I love my kids. I don’t care what he’s done, I love him anyway.”’
Kirsty remembers her own mum, glimpsed on a TV screen before someone hurriedly switched it off: flower-patterned polyester tent-blouse, fresh-bought for court, and trousers straining around the apron of stomach lying on her thighs, her hair scraped greasily back off a defiant face. Same thing, same phrase exactly; and after that, silence. Not a visit, not a birthday card. Love and presence, as Kirsty discovered, are not the same thing.
‘If she’d loved her kid,’ he says, ‘she’d have done something to teach him right from wrong.’
The hotel’s plate-glass door opens and several representatives of the New Moral Army exit, the placards that have recently decorated the conference suite under their arms. Kirsty grins. ‘You sound like you’re about to sign up for that lot.’
Stan laughs. ‘Yeah, I do, don’t I? Anyway. How many words have you got to scrape off the bottom of the barrel about this lot, then?’
‘About six hundred. News feature. You?’
‘Same. But for Features.’
‘Lucky sod.’ Features tend to allow more leeway in terms of letting their writers express opinions, draw analogies, recall similarities between the story at hand and ones from the past. Which, in the case of a story like this, can be a blessing. The launch she’s driven an hour to attend lasted fifteen minutes, and consisted of a speech of Cameronesque moral blandness followed by a Q&A of New Labour evasiveness. She’s going to be hard pushed to extract a couple of hundred quotable words from her digital recorder, and her shorthand pad is mostly filled with desperate descriptive squiggles about the set-dressing. ‘Have you got any more idea about what they stand for than you did when you went in?’
Stan shakes his head. ‘The world’s going to pot and Something Must Be Done? Something like that.’
‘Mmm,’ says Kirsty. ‘That’s what I thought too. And what is the Something?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he says. ‘This Gibson bloke made his money from “What would Jesus do?” merchandising, didn’t he? Keyrings and flip-flops and that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I should think he’d do whatever Jesus would do, then, wouldn’t he?’
‘Good point.’
‘Though I think Jesus would have started by providing sandwiches. What have you got lined up for the rest of the week?’
Kirsty shrugs uncomfortably. The silly season is not the best time to be a freelance journalist in a world that feeds itself by recycling the news wires. Especially not one with a redundant husband and half the staff of News International still morbidly freelance. ‘Nothing much. I’m pushing to go in for shifts, but they’re not biting.’
‘I know what you mean. My patch has got so big I’m buying a van to kip in. I hardly ever get home these days.’
They eye the young followers of Dara Gibson. Dark suits, tidy haircuts. They certainly look businesslike.
‘What we need is a nice juicy serial killer,’ says Stan. ‘Or an industrial disaster. Something that’ll get us over the holiday slump.’
‘Mmm,’ agrees Kirsty. ‘Only not too glamorous, or they’ll be sending people down from London to steal our jobs.’
Someone from London walks past: Sigourney Mallory, from the Independent, talking on her mobile and ignoring them. The two stringers eye her with suspicion. ‘What’s she doing here?’ asks Kirsty.
‘Dunno,’ says Stan. ‘Slumming it. She’s not been outside the Circle Line in years.’
The conference has been unusually well attended for an event of such little importance. People launch political pressure groups every day of the week. If the NMA had made their pitch once Parliament had come back and news had restarted, they’d have got a two-inch ‘News in Brief’ if they were lucky.
‘D’you think they’re Scientologists, maybe?’ asks Stan. ‘They certainly look like Scientologists.’
Kirsty shakes her head. ‘Too much Jesus talk, not enough conspiracy theory. No. It’s just a rich man’s vanity project, isn’t it? Nothing to see here. Move along.’
‘Right,’ says Stan. ‘I saw a pub on the ring road that said it did food. You coming?’
Kirsty jumps down from the wall, hoicks her bag on to her shoulder. It’s already two o’clock, and she has a five o’clock deadline. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Got to get home and file.’
‘Christ,’ says Stan. ‘File from the pub like a normal person.’
Her phone goes off in her pocket. She gets it out and looks at the display. Withheld. It’ll be the Tribune, or the bank, one or the other. One offering money, one asking for it. It’s not likely to be work, she thinks. They know I’m on a deadline, and anyway, it’s not commissioning time of day; it’ll just be starting to get frantic. The daily tides of newspapers wash the editors to the phones to dole out pieces between morning conference and the first rush of copy; after that they’ll just be calling to shout at you for filing late. It’s the bank, she thinks. It must be. Oh shit, I can’t talk to them. Not when I’ve got to have my brain together. She lets it ring out, puts it back in her pocket, feels the buzz of the incoming message a few seconds later.
‘Come on,’ wheedles Stan. ‘A quick drink and a sausage-an’-chips will set you up a treat. I’ll lend you my dongle.’
‘You know how to get to a girl, Stan,’ she says. ‘No, look, I’ve got to get the kids’ tea on once I’ve filed. I can’t be sitting there on the lager with you all afternoon.’
Stan tuts. ‘I dunno. Journalists aren’t what they used to be, are they?’
His phone too starts up in the pocket of his mouldy old parka. He gets it out, doesn’t even bother to look at it, answers. ‘Stanley Marshall?’
He puts his computer bag down on the tarmac, listens intently. Then: ‘Fuck me. Where did you say? In the hall of bleeding mirrors? Someone’s got a sense of humour.’
Kirsty gazes round the car park as she waits for him to finish, sees that all her colleagues are glued to their phones, nodding animatedly, scribbling stuff on the back of their hands. Shit, she thinks, that was work, wasn’t it? There’s some sort of big story kicked off, and I went and sent it to voicemail.
‘Yeah,’ says Stan. ‘Yeah, sure. I’m in Kent anyway. Yes, with the car. Don’t worry
. New Moral Arsewipes? Yeah. Sure. I can probably be down there in couple of hours. Fine. Yes. I’ll call when I’m in situ.’
He’s already picking his bag up as he hangs up, pulling a pack of Drum from his jacket. Looks down at Kirsty as he drops his phone back into his pocket. ‘If that was the Trib, you’d better call ’em back pronto,’ he says. ‘You don’t want this going to anyone else.’
‘What’s up?’ she asks, her heart sinking and leaping all at the same time.
‘Well, looks like this lot are off the news agenda, that’s for sure. A murder. Down in Whitmouth. Third this year, and it looks like there were two more with the same MO last season.’
‘Whoa,’ says Kirsty.
‘Yup,’ says Stan, with a happy chuckle. ‘Looks like I’ve got what I wished for. We’re off to the seaside!’
Chapter Seven
‘Living the dream,’ says Jackie, and cracks open her tinny.
‘You’re easily pleased.’ Amber throws her a grin.
‘Well, come on,’ says Jackie. ‘Who would want to be anybody else right now, right at this moment in time?’
‘Jackie!’ says Blessed pointedly.
Jackie frowns at her, then glances at Amber and remembers. ‘Oh, sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant – you know. Whitmouth. On a sunny day.’
Amber can’t suppress a smile as she looks down the beach. Half a mile of brown shingle overshadowed by a silent rollercoaster, a run-down pier, a couple of dozen bright-decked fast-food stalls strung along the edge of the pavement, canvas awnings flapping in the Channel wind, a towel and a plastic beer cooler.
‘You have a point,’ she replies.
‘This is why I live here,’ says Jackie.
‘Me too,’ replies Amber. It was the sea that first brought her here. But the sea’s not the only reason she stays. There are better bits of sea, she knows, and better towns, and probably better neighbours than this group of hers who’ve come down here together, but Whitmouth, with its lack of glamour and its contempt for aspiration, with its ceaselessly changing, unobservant crowds, makes her feel safe. She felt when she got here that she could put down roots, but still feels a tiny thrill of surprise every time she realises she’s actually managed it.
